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On Soccer: Messi in play amid high drama at Barcelona

More than a club, as the one-time marketing slogan turned mantra puts it, FC Barcelona has been a seeming full-on conflagration of late, even without the hot air of January’s transfer season to feed it.

And Monday night, their talisman Lionel Messi threw the biggest of logs on the fire. Before he watched Cristiano Ronaldo take the Ballon d’or as expected for 2014’s top global player, Messi answered a question about his future by admitting he didn’t know: “I am not sure where I will be next year. I have always said that I will end my career at Barcelona but as Cristiano said, ‘only God knows the future.’ Things in football can change overnight.”

So let’s recap these last two weeks at the Nou Camp, where the alarm bells are ringing: A trophyless 2014, and a meagre return from last summer’s juiced-up horse trading ahead of a one-year transfer ban, confirmed on appeal at the end of December, was enough to clear the box last week of director of football Andoni Zubizarreta. Versatile Carlos Puyol, the former defender and Roger Daltrey impersonator turned Zubi deputy, followed his mentor out the door. The team president appears a lame duck after moving up club board elections to this summer, one year ahead of schedule.

What spun this from mere white-collar misery into a spectacle worthy of news-crawl updates, though, was the one-sided manager-superstar dynamic, Messi and Luis Enrique feuding in semaphore. “A total rupture” was how Spanish daily Sport put it, and suddenly it was not so much a matter of if but when for Messi in a Chelsea kit for real, as opposed to the Photoshopped versions making the Internet rounds. Who needs transfer rumours when you have this kind of dizzying churn?

And now this. Messi’s not going anywhere at the mo, and given the 250-million euros buyout any club would have to pay to merely acquire his contract, it’s a big gulp if it ever comes to that (given Messi’s ongoing tax evasion case in Spain, the time couldn’t be better). The rules of these engagements, not to mention the fine print of Financial Fair Play regulations, dictate that Enrique is the one who will take the first fall. And after equally feverish speculation on his future, he was still quite upright on the touchline, and Messi back in the XI orchestrating a thorough 3-1 destruction of La Liga defending champion Atletico Madrid on Sunday.

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Canny, volcanic Atletico manager Diego Simeone’s plan called for running two extra defenders at Messi, but the Argentine’s close control, vision and guile — a hand ball that set him on his way toward starting the second goal on its way was artfully Maradonaesque work indeed — is such that all he came away with from such extra attention was a goal and a hand in two others from Neymar and Luis Suarez. It was a vintage performance, including even the first penalty he’s conceded, and the final riposte came in his post-game interview, a love letter to Barca, Enrique and media “lies.”

At this megaclub level these stories are as much about politics as sport, either the overt kind faced by Barca president Josep Bartomeu, who has no intention of going down in history as the man who let Messi walk, or the everyday variety Enrique faces managing a globally-branded megastar among a roomful of highly-paid and only slightly lesser though equally highly strung lights.

“There are some rules that everyone must comply with: that is one of my principles,” was Enrique’s one cryptic take-home nugget during the height of this “total rupture” that’s held together. For now, anyway — for all intents and purposes, Enrique is merely a bit player — Luis Who? — and his rulebook is about as comprehensible as the NFL’s. Messi, meantime, has gone from Barca icon to in play, and that changes everything in this season of turmoil in Catalonia.

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